July 2007. Nature and Culture International delivered a complete proposal for protecting 222,000 acres (90,000 hectares) of state forestland to the Minister of Environment. They are expected to officially declare the area as State Forest Patrimony very soon. This will assign it a conservation status and help protect it from deforestation.
The province of Zamora Chinchipe in the Amazon region of southern Ecuador has extensive forests that include some of the most important biological diversity in the tropics, for example the Condor Cordillera and Podocarpus National Park, in an area that has been recently declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO. In spite of their importance, deforestation has continued because of of illegal tree cutting, informal mining , establishment of pastures, and farming.
The Ecuadorian government has not been able to protect these virgin forests due to lack of adequate maps and field discriptions delimiting the exact boundaries.
For this reason, the Environmental Ministry of Ecuador and Nature and Culture International began a project at the end of 2006 to help define the boundaries of public forested lands to separate them from private land. These lands are now expected to be officially declared as "State Forest Patrimony" (PFE) and protected under Ecuadorian law.
